
By Carlos Fazio
On August 28, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced the creation of the Venezuela Affairs Unit (VAU), which will be located in the U.S. Embassy in Bogota, Colombia. This moves leaves no doubt that Colombia is being designated as the main platform for a US made coup dâĂ©tat against the constitutional and legitimate government of Nicolas Maduro and the servile role that Colombian President Ivan Duque is expected to play.
The Venezuelan Affairs Unit will be headed by James Story, a former chargĂ© dâaffaires at the U.S. Embassy in Caracas, who was one of the last diplomats to withdraw from the mission in the Venezuelan capital in March after President Nicolas Maduro broke off relations with Washington.
The level of the VAU is not traditional in the U.S. Foreign Service, and according to press reports it will not be equated to an âinterests sectionâ like the one that existed in Havana, Cuba, for decades. According to State Department sources, its provisional nature places it outside the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in terms of approving its staff, although it will continue to oversee the development of bilateral relations.
The creation of the U.S. parallel diplomatic office in BogotĂĄ had the bipartisan (Democrat/Republican) support of Congress, and seeks to give regional legitimacy to the blurred presidency of the Venezuelan National Assembly, Juan GuaidĂł, at a time of extreme political weakness of the internal opposition to Maduroâs government.
President Maduro broke off relations with the U.S. January 23, after Donald Trump ignored his jurisdiction and recognized GuaidĂł, his creation, as âpresident in chargeâ of Venezuela. This came in the midst of an intoxicated media blitz in the Western world aimed at pressuring, destabilizing and producing a âregime changeâ there, with the support of several Latin American far-right presidents grouped in the so-called Lima Group.
Since then, officials from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) began to make contact with Venezuelan diplomatic officials for purposes of recruitment and incitement to abandon their posts, particularly in Colombia, Panama and the United Nations.
According to journalistic reports, in exchange for becoming collaborators of the U.S. spy agency, CIA officials offered between 120 and 150 thousand dollars. In exchange those who defected would be obligated to give interviews in the media where they would promote, among other demands, rejection of President Maduro and the government they had defended up to that moment.
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Since then, too, CIA agents have increased their activities in Colombian territory. By 2018, the U.S. agency achieved the defection of the Venezuelan press attachĂ© in BogotĂĄ, Luis Espinoza. Also noteworthy is the support they have given to a terrorist network based in Peru, called âJaque Mate Venezuela 2019â, dedicated to the execution of violent acts in Venezuelan territory with the aim of destabilization.
Before the second round of presidential elections in Colombia, between IvĂĄn Duque and Gustavo Petro, in June 2018, the CIA prepared a public denunciation falsely accusing Royland Belisario, a member of the Bolivarian National Intelligence Service (SEBIN), of an alleged attack against the current president Duque. The version was covered by the Bogota daily El Tiempo on March 3 and attributed to âColombian intelligence agenciesâ.
On April 15, during a question-and-answer session at the University of Texas, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo stated that, âWhen I was director of the CIA, we lied, we cheated and we stole. We even had training courses.â The State Departmentâs official transcript censored those assertions, but they were recorded on video. And while it is public and notorious that throughout its history the CIA has done what Pompeo said, it is serious that the head of U.S. diplomacy refers to himself in that way.
On February 7, after the arrest of former Bolivarian National Guard colonel Oswaldo ValentĂn GarcĂa Palomo, Venezuelaâs Vice President of Communication, Culture and Tourism Jorge RodrĂguez revealed to the media the publication of intimidating messages and false news by anti-ChĂĄvez actors who outlined the framework of a series of coup actions.
GarcĂa Palomo had long had the support of the CIA and the governments of Colombia, Chile and Brazil. In his confession, the former soldier declared that the CIA had contacted him through retired General Antonio Rivero, an activist of the Popular Will Party (Party of GuaidĂł) and a CIA agent, according to Rodriguez. He also explained that in Colombian territory he had had the support of alias âAlejandroâ, a general of the Colombian National Police, who was the liaison with the government of Juan Manuel Santos.
The coup plan had been reactivated in May 2018, prior to the Colombian elections, with the advice of alias âIndianaâ and âColonel Leeâ by the CIA and âAlejandroâ from the Colombian government. Officials instructed GarcĂa Palomo on the attack plan against Venezuela during the first quarter of 2019, and his confession, according to Jorge RodrĂguez, came to dismantle the international misinformation intoxication campaign on the âhumanitarian crisis,â as an alibi for an invasion designed by the CIA and the Pentagon with support from the Organization of American States (OAS) and the Lima Group.
In the context of a prolonged imperial hybrid war of attrition, February 23, was scheduled as the umpteenth âD-Dayâ of the besieged Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, but instead would be another resounding failure of the international far-right terrorist that responds to the dictates of the White House.
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On that day one of the members of the CIA station in BogotĂĄ and US ambassador to the OAS, Carlos Trujillo accompanied U.S. Senator Marco Rubio and Florida State Representative Mario DĂaz-Balart on their visit to the Colombian town of CĂșcuta, bordering Venezuela and one of the main locations of tension between the two countries.
CĂșcuta, where according to the Colombian intellectual RenĂĄn Vega Cantor âparamilitary power reignsâ, had been the stage, the day before, of the concert âVenezuela Live Aidâ, organized by the cultural gusanerĂa of the Estefan clan (the marriage formed by Gloria and Emilio Estefan), which was attended by some 30 Made in Miami artists, including Silveste Dangond, called âthe paramilitary of vallenatoâ.
This concert of hatred and war was conceived as a distracting action on the Colombian-Venezuelan border, aimed at covering up a false flag operation in the framework of the alleged introduction of âhumanitarian aidâ to Venezuela by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), which since 1961 has been used by the CIA as one of its most powerful weapons for its covert operations.
In military jargon, false flag operations are those carried out clandestinely by an aggressive power, for the sake of appearing attacked and blaming the enemy. On February 23, two USAID trucks with supposed humanitarian aid for Venezuela were set on fire with Molotov cocktails on the Francisco de Paula Santander international bridge on the Colombian side by violent groups of the Venezuelan opposition. It was a complete CIA operation that U.S. Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of State Pompeo blamed on the âtyrantâ Maduro.
The operation, which was attended in situ by Colombian President Ivan Duque and his Chilean counterpart, Sebastian Piñera, as well as the lackey of the U.S. Ministry of Colonies, Uruguayan Luis Almagro, exhibited the links of the Miami Cuban-American mafia sponsored by the CIA with the âparacosâ of CĂșcuta and the continental ultra-right, but also the impunity with which the U.S. agency carries out its interventionist activities against Venezuela from the territory of Colombia.
From the beginning of 2019 to date, the U.S. Embassy in BogotĂĄ has been increasing the number of officials in its consulate in CĂșcuta with two main objectives: to support the visits of U.S. congressmen, politicians and military as well as chiefs and officers of the intelligence community who travel to that border region, and to monitor the situation in Venezuela, on which they issue daily reports that are forwarded to the State Department, the White House and the Pentagon.
The U.S. consulate in CĂșcuta has a high number of officials who are linked to the U.S. diplomatic mission in Caracas, which they had to evict after the brake of relations decreed by Nicolas Maduro. According to journalistic versions, among them there are some experts in covert operations and fieldwork with the Venezuelan ultra-right, paramilitary groups and criminal gangs, but also with opposition landowners who, as part of the economic war against Maduroâs constitutional government, carry out clandestine operations to extract minerals (gold, bauxite, iron), oil and gasoline to send abroad.
In this context, the creation of the Venezuelan Affairs Unit announced by Pompeo last week would reinforce the role of the Ălvaro Uribe-IvĂĄn Duque duo as Washingtonâs puppets and that of Colombia as a platform for the Pentagonâs and the CIAâs aggression against Venezuela.
Source URL: Resumen Latinoamericano – English

Carlos Fazio
Uruguayan journalist based in Mexico. It belongs to the writing of the newspaper La Jornada and collaborates with the weekly Gap, in Uruguay.